I found all these really cute vintage images online you can download for free and decided to make something with them.

I usually only decorate my chandelier that hangs over the kitchen table at Christmastime.  But I figured why not have something on it year round?

Some of the images came from Vintage Printable and some came from The Graphics Fairy.  In photoshop I took some custom shapes and just made little collages on them with some of the vintage images I downloaded.

At first my husband was skeptical about the little paper ornaments, but after two days he decided he liked them, lol.

What you’ll need:

A printer

8.5″x11″ paper to print out the designs (any kind will do, it can be photo paper, mat photo paper, regular plain paper, etc).  I used glossy photo paper.

Four sheets of sturdier cardstock or similar paper (could even use a thinner cardboard type paper you have laying around)

Scissors

Glue

Twine

Hole punch (just your regular run-of-the-mill office sized small hole punch will do, or even fancier ones if you have them.  The hole doesn’t have to be huge, just big enough to run the twine through.)

First print out all four sheets shown below (there’s a link below the preview photo where you can download the full size images)

Next take your four sheets you printed out and glue them to the sturdier cardstock or cardboard (I just used a regular glue stick but you can use any kind of glue or glue dots).

Now you should have each ‘ornament’ (the fronts and backs) cut out with the sturdy cardstock in between.

Now glue all those matching halves together (except for the circles, see below)

*  The circle paper ornament directions are HERE.  I added a little silver pony bead to the top of mine.

Next you just take your hole punch and make a hole at the top of each ornament and add a way to hang it, I just used twine (from the dollar store!) and tied them with simple bows on the chandelier.

Download my printable templates HERE and cut them out to create your own paper hangers

That’s it, hope you enjoy this really simple little DIY craft.  You don’t have to add that sturdier piece of cardstock or cardboard in between the images, but since these will hang all year (till Christmas) I wanted them to be fairly thick and strong.

You can hang these anywhere….you can make garland with them, hang them from shelves, decorate your home office, use them as decor on gifts, etc.

We went to Europe this past August and I have yet to print out and hang any photos of our trip!  I know, shame on me!  When I saw this tutorial HERE on how to make paper flowers, I got an idea.  I took a 5×7 frame I already had, covered it in pages from an old book (I just tore pages out and ripped them into strips), covered that with modge podge and then made the flowers from the same book and glued them on.  I also used a little distressing ink on everything since the book was fairly new and didn’t have that nice aged brown look to it and added a pretty brown ribbon to hang it by (just hot glued the ends of it on the back of the frame).  I think this was the perfect frame for the photo of the Eiffel Tower I took the day we were in Paris!

When I was in Michael’s craft store the other day, I found these adorable stitched letters in the clearance aisle and they had all three letters for our monogram, so I snatched them up!

I also started to see a ton of crochet stuff pop up on pinterest.com….seems it’s the hot new thing.   Of course crocheting has been around for a long time, and I was lucky enough to have my grandma teach me how to do it when I was little.  It had literally been 15 years since I picked up a crochet hook but I figured…what the heck….and it was easy, like riding a bike, I never forgot how to do it.  I figured I’d start out with something really simple and decided to do a big single square (granny square) blanket.  I think I’m about 3/4 of the way done with it (only took a few days to get that far).  I’m going to try and trim the edges when I’m done with pomp-a-doodle, never used any of the novelty yarns before, so we’ll see how that turns out.

My husband laughed and said it should be finished by the time all the cold weather leaves Florida.  Which, I think it has!  It was 80 degrees yesterday in Fort Myers!

Ooooh, I love antique stores.  My parents had to drag me to them when I was a little kid but as an adult, I just love them.

there’s so much to be found there!

Here’s a few things I picked up this past weekend.

Wooden thread spools.

I’ve got a project in mind for these and was so happy to find so many!

Buttons and milk bottles.

I’ve been looking for some buttons to use for another project, and figured these two glass milk bottles were cute and

would be nice to store the buttons in while they wait for me to use them.  I’m liking the buttons in the bottles so much

that I might have to buy MORE buttons so when I finish the project I want to do, I still have buttons to fill the milk

bottles.

As soon as I finish some of the projects, I’ll post them here.

I’ll leave you today with this….my little boy, Earl.  Last month when he turned 8 months old he was right at 100 pounds.

I haven’t been able to weigh him this month, but in a few days he’ll be 9 months old, and I know he’s well over 100

pounds.  My little growing boy!

I’m LOVING Pinterest, there’s so much to be found on there…and it’s such an easy way to save anything you find on the web and share with friends.

My sister-in-law is going to be bringing my niece up to our house to do a photo shoot and I was thinking…I need something for the shoot but I didn’t know what I wanted.  We of course have a ton of great places to shoot on our five acres….fallen logs, great trees, pine cones, wooden fences, etc… but I wanted something extra.

I found this tutorial HERE on pinterest of how to create heart garland.  I figured I’d do my own take on it.  I followed the tutorial, but instead of hanging them from ribbon I used twine to make loops and then hung them on another longer piece of twine so I can hang them between trees or even have my husband and brother-in-law just hold the garland behind my niece as we move around the yard.

I used what I had on hand.  Photo paper (created 2″x6″ strips in photoshop and just covered them with different patterns, I figured doing them with photos was a fantastic idea, but these are just going to be in the background and all I wanted was for them to be colorful), then printed out the sheets and cut them with my paper cutter.  Then just grabbed my staples and twine I had laying around and…viola’!

If you want to find some cute patterns, try the photoshop .pat files over at Deviantart.com

I wasn’t really exact in any measurements other than the strips I cut for the hearts.

Have fun making your own!